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Berkeley's new law does not simply ban plastic foodware, leaving businesses to replace it with other throwaway materials: It rejects throwaway culture altogether.
“If your bathtub was overflowing, you wouldn’t immediately reach for a mop — you’d first turn off the tap. That’s what we need to do with single-use plastics.”
Marketcraft as the New Statecraft
What if we thought of marketcraft (market governance) as a core government function comparable to statecraft? And what if we sought to optimize market governance rather than to minimize government intervention? Steven Vogel submits that this simple reframing would generate analysis of market dynamics and prescriptions for government policy that deviate fundamentally from the conventional “free market” wisdom. Read the full post:
Fear of Losing Everything: Why Elites Resist the Reforms That Could Save the System
By Cliff Potts Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 22, 2026 One of the persistent puzzles in political economy is why societies sometimes fail to make reforms that could stabilize their institutions before crisis occurs. Economists, sociologists, and historians have repeatedly observed that the people most capable of implementing such reforms are often the ones most reluctant to pursue…
The Institutional Signal: Why Public Policy is the Ultimate Metric for Vegan Growth
While consumer trends and retail sales provide a snapshot of current demand, government policy and institutional procurement offer a more durable signal of long-term plant-based adoption.
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Generation Jones, Part 9 of 12: Normal Without Repair
By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS NewsBaybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 1, 2027 By the fall of 1975, the shouting had stopped. Vietnam was over. Richard Nixon was gone. Gas lines were no longer nightly footage. The Middle East was no longer the only sermon illustration. The country felt calmer. But calm is not the same thing as repair. The Civil Rights Act had passed a…
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Race and the Future of the Love Story Part 2 (Encore)
Romantic senior couple celebrating Saint Valentine’s Day at home. Woman holding old book and red rose with her husband with wine in background. (Photo by: shixart1985) In 2019 a well known romance writer began tweeting about other writers in her community and concerns about racism. It led to a huge reckoning within an organization called the Romance Writers of America, which is still unfolding.…
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How institutions change
Organizations face a conflict between tradition and change. In the row between the Royal Family and Prince Harry, we see an institution dealing with this in real time.
As an American, I have no position regarding the British Royal Family. We signed a paper in 1776 that settled this. But I’ve learned enough about English history to know this isn’t the first tiff within the Royal Family or the worst. Just be glad Prince Harry wrote a book and did a bunch of interviews, and he’s not strapping on armor and amassing an army to storm Buckingham Palace. I’m interested…
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Economic sociologists an political economists will surely discern the grace and insight in the following Joseph Schumpeter’s quote (from his magnum opus Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy), which beautifully describes the essence of institutions, their socio-historical embeddedness, as well as their persistence in front of change:
“Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of this ability to survive, we almost always find that actual group and national behaviour more or less departs from what we should expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of the productive process.” (Schumpeter 1943: 12-13)
